NTT (News - Alert), a telecommunications company based in Japan, and EnterpriseDB, an enterprise Postgres company, have jointly developed Postgres-XC (eXtensible Cluster) technology that will provide greater scalability and encourage further Postgres development.
"This is what open source development is all about," said Matt Asay, COO at Canonical, in a statement.
Asay said that joint development of technology based on a real-world use case is what makes open source software so successful.
"By contributing this technology to the larger open source community for further development, EnterpriseDB and NTT are providing building blocks for significant enhancements to Postgres," he said.
Company officials said that Postgres-XC, which is based upon the open source Postgres code and utilizing the same application programming interface, is a write-scalable synchronous multi-master Postgres cluster with both read and write-scalability.
According to company officials, Postgres-XC, which is designed to greatly increase Postgres' scalability and reliability, is being contributed to the open source community for further development in order to leverage the rapidly growing Postgres ecosystem of developers, partners and end-users.
Postgres-XC, which is still in its early development stage, already includes significant feature functionality including Global Transaction Management and proven scalability.
Company officials said that Postgres-XC's Global Transaction Management, which controls multiple transactions distributed over clustered database nodes, dramatically improves both data-read and data-write performances.
"Postgres-XC is a joint project by NTT and EnterpriseDB created to enhance the high availability and scalability of Postgres, so that it can be more easily deployed in operations and business support systems and in-the-cloud service infrastructures", said Noritaka Uji, senior executive vice president, NTT.
Uji said that NTT has been contributing to the Postgres Global Development Group for years by providing new features and improving quality.
"Consequently, our research engineer, Takahiro Itagaki, in the Open Source (News - Alert) Software Center (NTT OSSC) was selected as one of the major contributors by the Group. We'll continuously spend our efforts to contribute to the open source communities," he said.
EnterpriseDB and NTT previously announced a partnership in which the two companies shared their intention to collaborate with the goal of enhancing and extending Postgres, specifically in the areas of scalability and high availability, which are of particular importance in large-scale distributed database environments in data centers. Postgres-XC is one such result of this collaboration.
"Enterprise database users want control back and to get it they need new open source alternatives to their most expensive database spend. This is what Postgres-XC promises to deliver," said Ed Boyajian, CEO of EnterpriseDB.
Boyajian said that it has always been the company's core mission to promote and expand the use of Postgres, which is why the company has partnered with NTT to develop Postgres-XC.
He said that the contribution of this code to the community will greatly expand the Postgres ecosystem and further solidify Postgres as the most complete, cost-effective, enterprise-class database.
Anil Sharma is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anil's articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by Marisa Torrieri